Under a plan brewing in the state legislature, a new voting bloc would join New Jersey’s 5.27 million registered voters — ex-offenders.

Prospective new voters would be signed up at the exit doors of prisons and jails — or parole and probation offices — under bills awaiting action in the state Assembly and Senate.

The pool of new voters would be potentially huge. There are 23,000 in state prisons, 70,000 on probation and 16,000 on parole.

Thousands of them annually become legally eligible to vote upon “maxing out” their sentences or fulfilling their probationary or parole terms.

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The legislation to sign them up as voters is part of an “enfranchisement movement” that’spercolating throughout the nation. The movement recently received an influential boost

from the country’s top law enforcement official, U.S. Attorney Gen. Eric Holder.

In an address at Georgetown University Law Center, Holder chastised states that deny or strictly limit voting rights for ex-offenders. He said that such laws disproportionately strip African Americans and Latinos of the vote.

New Jersey is one of 20 less strict states that restore voting rights to offenders once they complete their sentences, probations or paroles.

Still, New Jersey’s rules deny the vote to more than 100,000, according to the Sentencing Project and other advocacy groups for offenders. The state’s voting restrictions apply to offenders convicted of first-degree through fourth-degree crimes.

Some advocacy groups favor restoring the vote to offenders while they’re still on probation or parole. Thirteen states and Washington, D.C., have such arrangements.

A few groups call for the lifting of all restrictions, allowing offenders to cast ballots even behind bars. Two states — Maine and Vermont — do allow such inmate voting, by absentee ballot. (Canada also has no voting restrictions on inmates.)

Eleven states, mostly in the South and West, permanently strip those convicted of serious felonies of their voting rights.

Attorney Gen. Holder says 5.8 million Americans of voting age are disenfranchised by state voting restrictions on offenders — a number greater than the population of 31 states, he adds. That, he says, is “too significant to ignore” and “too unjust to tolerate.”

The bills pending in New Jersey’s legislature would require corrections, parole and probation authorities to establish aggressive registration programs, in Spanish and English, for offenders nearing the fulfillment of their terms.

Any who don’t register would sign a “declination” form, which would be kept on file to help track official compliance with the initiative. The legislation bars officials from pushing a particular party or candidate.

The sponsors of the legislation in the Assembly are Angelica Jimenez, D-West New York, and Sheila Oliver, D-East Orange, the

former Assembly Speaker. A matching bill is pending in the Senate.

Influential voices sounding the call for extending the vote to the country’s vast offender population include the editorial pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, the ACLU — which has a “Felon Enfranchisement Project” — and Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch says offender voting restrictions are “political anachronisms” that “diminish” minority political clout. Holder sounded a similar note in his Georgetown speech. Such restrictions are “not in keeping with our democratic values,” he said.

He further contended they are counterproductive. He pointing to a study that came to the debated conclusion that restrictive measures against offender voting contribute to recidivism.

Such measures take a high disenfranchisement toll especially among young black males, he said. These measures should be eased for nonviolent offenders, and any who’ve met their obligations under the law should have their right to vote restored, he added.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor may prove to be a well placed ally in the cause, if the issue reaches the high court. As a lower-court federal judge in the 2006 case of Hayden v. Pataki, she cast a dissenting view that restrictive voting measures for offenders may violate the civil rights Voting Act.

In the political arena, though, the felon enfranchisement cause has, thus far, met stiff resistance. In 2002, voters of the solidly blue Commonwealth of Massachusetts supported a constitutional amendment withholding the vote from offenders. In 2002, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly rejected a bill to restore voting rights to felons in federal elections.

Opponents of restrictive laws against offenders trace the measures to the country’s post-Civil War Reconstruction era and concerted efforts in the South to keep blacks away from the polls.

While not contesting the point, historians say the practice goes further back than that. Athens and other ancient Greek city-states banned offenders from the polls under the label of “atemia,” meaning “without honor.”

And, add the historians, Medieval Germany took offender disenfranchisement a step further, exiling offenders to live in the forest.

In early America, offenders were stripped of the vote under the doctrine of “civil death,” which also denied them the right to hold or inherit property.

Offender enfranchisement, however, is more than an academic issue.

It has not only a touchy racial aspect but a touchy partisan one.

Conservative skeptics are not reticent in their suspicions that offenders are inclined to vote Democratic. And numerous studies and surveys confirm the suspicions, indicating that offenders lean Democratic by lopsided

margins of 70 to 80 percent. The offender vote was at the eye of the storm of one of America’s most fiercely disputed presidential elections — George W. Bush’s election-tipping, 537-vote Florida margin over Al Gore in 2000.

Gore partisans contend that offenders who were mistakenly stricken from Florida’s voter rolls would have put Gore over the top, given the offender inclination to vote Democratic.

A Miami Herald analysis of the vote came to another conclusion — although one also turning on the vote of offenders. Matching Florida voter lists with state correctional data, the paper reported that more than 5,000 felons managed to vote who shouldn’t have been allowed to under Florida law.

Meanwhile, a $1-million analysis of the Florida vote by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago concluded that Bush likely would have edged out Gore in Florida even under vote-counting procedures Gore favored.

So, if the 5,000 questionable offender votes cited by the Miami Herald weren’t quite enough to put Gore over the top, they were enough to move him within protesting distance — and to make offender voting thereafter a controversial topic.